Yeah. I was going to write in response to Carl that I'd wished I'd actually made real bets with people. I don't recall when I said it, but I pointed out that, if you looked at neocon literature (*cough*) and what their aim is (which is not republican party building), then it would be entirely clear that his status as lameduck would mean squat. They don't care that they may lose the presidency in 2008. They don't care about losing Congress already and perhaps some more. This guys are romantics in their vision of power, not the neo-realists they claim to be.
but, of course, such aims are the product of capitalism, too. they don't come from nowhere, but have a material basis in capitalist social relations. (now andie, I think that's some old skool marxist talk there.) Sometimes, I think they represent that faction of the capitalist class Marx described in the !8th Brumaire or maybe it was the German Ideology. There he said that capital consisted of the owners of the means of production *and* their ideologists. But ideologists could express contradictions (schisms) within capital. But what happens when, as in this case, there is a kind of, hmmm, autonomization (?? word choice) of this faction of rightwing intellectuals. What happens when the effectively forge a material foundation for themselves that is distinct from any specific reliance on one faction of capital or another -- through the very division of labor itself?
Now that I stop and think about it, this was sort of James Burnham's argument about corporate managers wasn't it? While he fetishized their power and glorified fascistic tendencies in his later work (I think I'm remembering this correctly), he argued that corporate management could grow to have a kind of distinct autonomy that could pit them against capital and for their own interests. This had a material basis: the division of labor itself.
I'm heading off into la la theory land now...
>But leaving that aside--- the f-word? I find myself wondering if the
>eagerness of some leftists to call it "fascism" when ordinary americans
>start to recoil from the savagery of their leaders relates to how
>incredibly little the left has been able to harness or participate in the
>current cratering of support for this war. Has anyone noticed how
>marginal the left has been to these 80% dissaproval ratings for the
>war? Does our estrangement from the cultural mainstream have anything to
>do with this? What else is "potentially fascist"? The NFL
>playoffs? Chick lit? Toby Keith? Pentecostalism? Mixed martial
>arts/UFC? Eating fast food?
I really don't think Carrol is up to this. Perhaps others. He has a longstanding complaint against the too casual use of the f-word against anything and everything, as a way to demonize whatever the word is applied to -- as if it is some huge puss dripping boil blemishing the ass of capitalism.
ARe there other denouncing the working class as fascists? Send them Queer Dewd's way: I'll eviscerate 'em. :)
As for Carrol, I understand what Carrol means. I know that when I talk to people about what's going on, if I simplify it too much, people come to see the issue as one where you just need to get rid of Shurb and it'll all be cool.
And this, of course, is not so great for sustaining a political movement right? Because everything will just kind of evaporate once shrub is out of office. And thus,you've not laid yourself any groundwork for going after the Clintonesque-ordinary operations in which people are killed for US imperialist ends as a matter of course.
As for the movement hardly having anything to do with people changing their tune about the war, I'm not surprised. And why should we be? War is a nasty thing. People instinctively don't like it, particularly in a putative democracy. Support forit was always shallow, whipped up on the basis of infotainment induced information warfare.
Personally, I'm not much for the argument that you can build a sustained left social movement on the basis of antiwar activism. I'm more for the Boots Riley vision:
Boots Riley (of The Coup) December 11 2003, 22:57:46 <...>
While I'm on the subject, one of the other criticisms I have of many current revolutionary organizations (I should say here that I used to be in, and on the central committee of, the PLP) is they have taken the old slogan "reform AND revolution" and distorted it into "reform OR revolution". Every single person in the working class is in a daily struggle against the ruling class in order to just buy groceries and pay rent. But they are struggling individually because no one has organized them. This struggle for survival is the first struggle most people are willing to fight, die, and sometimes kill for. It's the reason people sell dope, work three jobs, and steal checks out of mailboxes. It's why songs are written about "bling-bling". It's why we need a new system. These struggles around basic survival could be led by revolutionaries who would use these reform struggles to have victories and losses that would inspire, organize, and teach masses of people lessons about the system much more effectively than the little red book could do alone.
The CPUSA did this in the '20s and '30s and it got them about a million committed party members and countless others who were sympathetic. This strategy had the ruling class actually fearing revolution. When reforms are won with a revolutionary analysis and plan attached people accept the ideas as being connected materially to reality and not just intellectuals wanting to hear themselves. Coming up in Oakland, for instance, I didn't really encounter anti-communism, it was just like "Communism? So? That's cool but I gotta go pay some bills." We need to make union movements that are revolutionary, help and instigate rent strikes, and generally do some fighting and movement building at this level. If we don't, revolutionary organizations will only attract those ALREADY interested in revolution or some kind of counter-culture, which means we attract only a certain "type" of person who then attracts similar types. If we are going to win we need to have campaigns in which the community immediately changes their material situation. This can teach the necessity and possibility of a new kind of system. It will also attract people who embrace the ideas as a material necessity in their lives as opposed to a hypothetical debate.
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